The more I speak to people, representatives of corporations, medium and small business, it has become very clear to me that despite the nascency of social media, many are still unaware of the tremendous branding and traffic opportunities they could employ to move the needle for their business. SEM and display advertising are still the online vehicles of choice. In these tentative times spending resources have to be managed appropriately and it’s clear that this new form of marketing can help drive significant organic traffic that is much more sustainable than these traditional methods. In an attempt to find some live cases, I purposely pursued a few people whom I follow on Twitter to provide me with valuable insight into how Social Media has worked for them.

Part 1 of my 2-part series features Joselin Mane. Joselin heads a company called LITBeL Consulting that provides leading edge marketing services for SEO, SEM, social media and web development. Joselin has been living/breathing within the social media space since the dot-bomb in the late ‘1990’s, before a term was even applied to this space. His guidance on the value of social media for any business, large or small is pretty inspiring.

I was privileged to be a part of the SOHO Conference in Toronto and speak about Social Media Marketing. Unfortunately, I don’t think I was effectively able to get my main points across due to some time constraints. So what I’ve done is provided the presentation on my site so attendees can download it. I’ve also included my speaking notes so you can get a full view of my message. Please note, as part of my presentation I pursued a few online marketing colleagues through Twitter in an attempt to provide important insights on how this medium can help drive your business. In the coming days, I will post my interviews with Joselin Mane of LITBeL Consulting and Alejandro Reyes of Successfool.com

I’d like to give credit for parts of the presentation that I pulled from Forrester’s “Groundswell”, IBM’s “The End of Advertising as we know it,” “Stompernet” (a strong resource for all my learning) and “Universal McCann’s Wave 3 Study”. I’d also like to give credit to David Jones, a good friend of mine, who was my first coach on the social media scene. Alejandro and Joselin, excerpts of our conversation were also part of my presentation. Thanks again for taking the time to help me get my message out there.

Here’s the slideshow:

Speaker Notes:

Social Media Marketing stems from this phenomena called Web 2.0. This presentation will discuss how the web has evolved in the last few years and why it makes sense to take advantage of this growing trend called Social Media, harness its benefits and help you grow your business and entrench your customers.

Slide 2 What is Web 2.0? It is a living term describing changing trends in the ways software developers and end-users use the Web that have helped shape this new creativity, information sharing, collaboration and functionality of the web. Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites, video sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies. An important distinction for you is that Web 2.0 has huge implications for what we call the Long Tail –> ie niche communities. Pareto’s Principle states that 20% of the population control 80% of the wealth. These are the Coke’s and Mcdonald’s of the world. What’s more important is the immense opportunity for the remaining 80% of the web population, who can NOW can start leveraging 2.0 to help move the needle for their businesses.

Slide 3 Before social computing, the web was static; centrally managed; slow to change – content wasn’t always refreshed; and unidirectional ie top down where information was provided and dictated by experts/establishments — libraries, research institutions who traditionally were the sources of information. These were sources we didn’t question.

Now, in this new space there is this a shift:
– From Centralization to decentralization. This means the move away from what we remember as the “mainframe computer” to the emergence of peer to peer networks.
– From Unidrectional to participation. The participation from the masses means the audience is contributing to conversation and information exchange taking place. All this is creating new knowledge streams through user generated content. Simultaneously, this audience is not readily accepting the content provided by mainstream media and traditional sources as truth.

Slide 4 People formerly known as the audience now have the power and technologies are making it easier for the audience to have some control over content. In a nutshell, we are harnassing collective intelligence that is very much a user-submitted and user controlled.

Generally, if people can submit links to content, submit content, make comments and vote good/bad content up/down thus affecting the amount of traffic that content can generate, it’s Web 2.0.

Slide 5 This is some data obtained from an IBM study completed last year that provided a view into how the future of advertising needs to change. Important to note is that media has become increasingly fragmented and the consumer’s time is split among many mediums and devices through newsprint, TV, radio, mobile the internet. Marketers, in general, are challenged more than ever to find those consumers where they are and how to message them appropriately.

Despite this fragmentation, the one area were a significant adoption is being realized specifically for those between 18-34 are social and User generated content sites, where, by the way, there exists little advertising. Interesting to note the significant adoption percentages among 35-54 on social networking sites as well.

Slide 6 Forrester authors, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff came out with a publication called “Groundswell”. They sought to analyze the web population, how they approach social technologies and the level of interaction in which they engaged. They defined as “the groundswell” as “the social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other instead of from companies.” IMPORTANT: they find interest in each other BUT they expect you as a company to listen. They divided up the groundswell into 6 distinct personas: creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators and inactives”. You’ll notice the majority of the web population are passive consumers or what we call spectators or inactives. They read blogs, video, browse . But increasingly we’re find a greater move in other areas of participation ie people who actually comment on blogs, rate and review, use RSS feeds. Participation is increasing. Your creators and critics are your early adopters, bloggers, key influencers in this space who can also command a huge following and may be integral to the success of your business.

Slide 7 Forrester looked at this population to determine the age segmentation applied to each segment on the technographics profile. Groups 25-34 over index in pretty much every segment category stated here. Interesting to note are that the 35-44 group are beginning to be a bit more active in these areas as well showing the move towards social networks is not limited only to these young kids. We’re starting to see a move within the older demographic especially within the creators and critics segments. This medium is increasingly being leveraged for the business value that it holds.

Slide 8 While Web 2.0 defines an era that has changed the face of the web, social media as a subset include those online apps, platforms and media that are making it easier for social computing to expand.

Slide 9 Universal McCann did a study earlier this year called Wave 3 that sought to understand the prevalence of social media from a global perspective. It looked at over 29 countries, 17,000 internet users to determine the frequency and usage of each of these social media behaviours. In all these cases since 2006 social media behaviours show a significant increased over 2 years. Some of the highest gains were found in: creating a social network profile, downloading a podcast, reading blogs. There was only one non-gainer among the bunch: ” leaving a comment on a news site”. This again is your traditional centralized, established information source which is still not perceived as a forum for real sharing or reviewing, but significant gains are being made in this space as well and news organizations like CNN are leading the way.

Slide 10 Some of the major findings in this study: 1) The largest participation of social media is in Asia 2) Blogs are now mainstream with over 184 MM bloggers worldwide. China alone has the largest blogging community in the world 3) The fastest growing platform is video.

Social media impacts your brand’s reputation : 1) 36% think more positively about companies that have blogs 2) 34% post opinions about products and brands on their blog

Slide 11 The essence of social marketing is NOT about selling, or being misleading. It’s not about you. The end goal is selling and it will be realized but heed the principles of the space and tread cautiously.

Social media is about about reaching out and connecting and hanging out with like-minded individuals and socializing and creating relationships. Let me illustrate some of the points above through examples.

Successfool.com. I had a conversion with Alejandro Reyes last week. I met him on Twitter. If anybody knows Alejandro’s story, he launched successfool.com April 1st of this year as a social media experiment to test the power of this medium. To launch his site he had he no marketing dollars. So he went onto Twitter and started watching conversations. Once in a while he would interject and provide comments or responses to questions. Before you know it he was gaining a huge following on Twitter and connecting with some very important influencers in the space. Within a few months he had garnered over 2000 followers on Twitter and over 17,000 backlinks to his site. By becoming this “resource of information” he began to raise the level of his influence and credibility. When I asked Alejandro to what he attributes his success, he said, “If you meet the right people, they will teach you the right things if they have your best interest in mind.” That is authenticity. He also indicated that social media is very fast-paced and the minute you put yourself out there you are defining your brand, and raising your level of awareness. How you engage in this medium will determine your success. “If you’re out there making offers on your stuff continuously and you’re not engaging with your audience, you’re just diluting your list and your brand. No one will listen to you anymore.”

Joselin Mane runs a company called LITBeL out of Boston. He is another social media success story. Joselin left mainstream business to venture out on his own about 8 years ago. By his very nature, he is social and he found it easy hanging out and talking with marketing people on the web. Joselin’s advice to small businesses: “Businesses NEED to keep in tune with the stuff that’s happening around them. LISTEN and try to understand what people are talking about, especially with respect to your business. Do you have an immediate solution or suggestion? Put it out there and see if it has legs. There is a premium on being a Convenient Resource — someone who provides a solution to a question when it’s asked. The value you get is consistent with the value you deliver. Be open, respond and embrace and most of all RESPECT the medium.” With Twitter, Joselin states, “Twitter is fast-paced, real-time and you have an amazing opportunity to be part of a full-fledged conversation with influencers who have their pulse on the market, as well as potential customers.” In combination, they have the power to elevate your business to a new level.

I spoke with one of my blogger friends, Tizio, who I met on scribd. As part of a blogger network, he puts it this way, “In my opinion, the great revolution in marketing isn’t the technology, the creativity or the WOM. The real revolution is to speak the truth. Engage discussions and don’t be misleading.”

Slide 12 If you do it it and do it right what you’re going to do is build sustainable traffic to your site from people who have subscribed to you, based on the value you’ve provided to them. It takes a lot of effort but you’re building yourself a credible foundation based on virtually no monetary investment. The caveat to that is the time you need to invest to reach the right people. Once you do, WOM will kick in, further increasing the business opportunity. Once you have conversion, you’ll need to continue to leverage the medium to maintain/grow the connection beyond the sale.

Slide 13 Important: Building credibility is equivalent to building authority and eventually you will get the attention in the form of traffic.

Understand your Page rank or Quality Score. This is a measure of number of links point to your page and how many links point to the pages that point to that page. How do we get your page rank up?

You cannot get ahead by using the tools of web 2.0 without a blog — PERIOD. Blog content systems are the darlings of search engines. Having a blog means that you have a search engine magnet and an interactive community builder that will drive targeted visitors to your site.

Scribd and technorati can be other ways to build your own authority because again they’re based on what you’re sharing ie your blog content, relevant documents. If viewers like it, they’ll subscribe to you. Use this as opportunity to occasionally drive traffic to your own pages.

Comment on other blogs. Use track backs to add your URL and drive viewers to your blogs. If what you’ve had to post is interesting or valuable then people will come to you.

Flickr and video through some really cool streaming video tools like Mogolus and UStream are making it easier for people like you and me to create some real web-branding with professional-looking interfaces.

Yahoo! Answers gets excellent rankings on search engines. Easily build authority on the number of categories for your niche business.

Reciprocal Links — exchange links with your affiliations ie like businesses, vendors or resellers to help drive traffic back to your site

Social bookmarking:
1) Bookmark stuff on a regular basis that has nothing to do with making you money or building your business: articles, thought-leadership
2) Bookmark frequently ie several times per day
3) Social Bookmarking is measured by the number of times other people book your stuff – delicious, reddit, digg, stumbleupon
4) Bookmark things that haven’t discovered yet
5) Bookmark stuff that the group has bookmarked that’s consistent with your beliefs/or not
6) Use your expertise to show others what is good in several categories
7) Comments take more time but add depth to the bookmarking process
8) Add friends, join groups and participate in discussions
9) Only post your own stuff — your business stuff – after proving your worth

Slide 14 Be accessible to your current/potential customers.

Squidoo: Become an expert in your field simply by having a lens on your specific product/service. Use Squidoo as a niche barometer to to judge whether people are actually interested in your product. Finally, use it to build customer community — bring people together who have used your product and have them communicate with you and to each other. This gives you an opportunity to obtain product suggestions, testimonials, and feedback for future revisions
–Twitter: This is a form of microblogging that allows you access to experts in your field and your customers/potential customers. You have 140 characters to say what you’re doing. Engage in conversation and share some important sites or current events or make inquiries to your list. But, add value. This medium is used by strong influencers to get a pulse on the market.

Get Satisfaction Develop a profile on this site if you have an online product. Use this as a forum for discussion or product inquiries.

Final Slide As per Joselin Mane: The Value you Get = The Value that you Give.

Monitor Look at what’s being said about you through your customers, and your blogs and manage your brand proactively.Analyse Distill what’s being said and develop an interaction strategy on how you respondInteract Engage with the community. Do it often and have the open dialogue. Remember to look out for people’s best interests.Lead Be the Subject Matter Expert. Establish your authority and ensure you continue to add value and are consistent in your effort.

Joselin sent me this video that depicts the very nature of the Web 2.0 world. It’s called “The Machine is Us/ing Us”